Augmented Reality to go With Your New Mini Cooper

The automotive industry has been working a lot recently to bring digital innovations to their products. The latest of a long list of cool new collaborations comes from the union of the MINIni, Qualcomm and a San Francisco-based designer, the fruit of which is a pair of augmented reality glasses that connect drivers and their MINIs in totally new ways.

These new glasses will act in a similar way to Google’s glasses, in that they bring several of the car’s dashboard elements of the car’s app ecosystem, called “MINI Connected,” to face level – they link up with the car’s Connected system and project data in your field of vision, so as not to distract you from driving.

The product’s HD lenses can project 3D images and feature WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS. In this innovative and completely novel way of re-inventing a driver’s experience, street signs become big arrows appearing directly on the road (as an overlay to reality). The glasses can also remotely scan parking lots for empty spaces.

MINI’s Manager of Product Planning, Patrick McKenna, described them as, “that next-level of head-up display, not designed to replace the driver, but to aid them instead.”

The most shocking feature of this new product from MINI is their apparent ability to also see “through” a car to show what is going on.